Posts by Jesse Ortman

Jesse Ortman is a Regional Technical Manager at Alignex, Inc. When Jesse isn’t working with customers to solve their engineering challenges or keeping up on the latest SOLIDWORKS innovations, you will most likely find him riding his fat bike.

Sometimes you will find yourself in a situation where you need to create an extrude-cut on a curved surface. People new to SOLIDWORKS get freaked out just at the thought of tackling such a complex endeavor, but really it's not as difficult as it seems.

Today I'm going to walk you through the step-by-step process on how to create an extrude-cut on a curved surface, and offer a few quick tips along the way.

When files are too large to transfer over regular Windows Explorer FTP or if a more intuitive interface is desired, many clients choose to use FileZilla. Below is a step-by-step guide on how to install and use FileZilla.

Do you reuse geometry from other SOLIDWORKS part models to elminate the need to re-model or sketch a new part?

In this video blog, I'll be taking a look at boolean operations—such as Common, Add and Subtract—and other multibody techniques to increase the speed of your design creations and reduce the time spent fixing broken trees. Plus, learn how to maintain existing features while also adding new geometry.

Learn how to use the Draft Analysis tool in SOLIDWORKS to check the correct application of draft to the faces of parts that will be manufactured by the molding process. Commonly used in the plastics industry, it will help identify faces on your model that don’t meet minimum angular or taper requirements. Since this tool shows where both positive and negative angles meet, it is also helpful when deciding where to put a parting line.

Learn how to check for clearance failures between your assembly's components or faces with the Clearance Verification tool. By specifying the minimum acceptable clearance around your components you can pinpoint areas in your assembly that may require extra attention.

With the recent release of SOLIDWORKS 2016 there have been some really nice enhancements in the Assembly Mates arena. Some of these new enhancements are crowd pleasers and are sure to increase productivity for any user. Veteran users included.

The very first and probably the most productive one is when you are in the Mate command. The very first click you do on a face of a component turns that component transparent. This allows immediate visual and selection access to another component that was ‘underneath’ or ‘inside’ of it.